Colours

Seamus Finnigan climbed the last few stairs to the front door of his narrow Council rowhouse, and fumbled for his wand in his pockets. Mumbling Latinate words he unlocked the door and pushed his way into the living room. It had been a long day at the hospital and he had been forced to take an extra shift when some of the night doctors hadn't turned up. He felt exhausted, and absolutely sick and tired of healing. The house was completely dark, and he lit the tip of his wand to guide him up the stairs to the bedroom. Perhaps he wouldn't disturb Dean too much if he just left his bag outside the door and sidled into the bedroom without having a shower.

"Seamus?" Dean's sleepy voice called even before he had put his healer's bag down. Seamus rolled his eyes, and then pushed the bedroom door open.

In the dark bedroom he could only make out rumpled pillows and the outline of a raised head and angular shoulders. "What are yer doing up, Dean, it's nearly three in the morning." he said, trying to sound concerned for Dean's health as he toed off his shoes. "Go back to sleep."

"Heard you coming in." the other man said, yawning. "Do you want to take a shower?"

"No." Seamus replied, shrugging off his robes and kicking them into a corner. "I just want... ahhh."

He sank gratefully into bed, into cool sheets and soft battered pillows, the downy mattress taking all the weight off his tired back and leaden legs. "Argh." Seamus groaned. "You know, it's starting to get painful to stay up late? It must be a sign of age."

Beside him Dean shifted, the light from the window just touching his smile. "What happened tonight?" he asked. "I thought you said you'd be back by one."

"That was before the party of 6 who'd been mauled by a runaway grinch."

"God."

"Read about it in tomorrow's newspapers." Seamus yawned. "They'll be all right though."

"Finnigan was on call." Dean said, amused.

"He was indeed. Now he'd like to faint." and Seamus clapped his hand over an enormous mouth-breaking yawn.

Dean looked disappointed. The cool glow from the window - was it moonlight or starlight? no, it was the frosted street lamp on the corner - made him look lovely, washing his dark skin in pale silver so that he was outlined in light, while the contrasting shadows thrown from the window made him look like he was cut from inky velvet. Seamus eyed him in delight.

"You're so beautiful." he murmured, inanely. "So... black. I love it."

"//What?//" Dean's voice sharp with surprise, cutting through the comfortable haze around Seamus' mind. He blinked awake, conscious of some mistake, staring as Dean now sat up.

Dean asked, "You love it that I'm black?"

"Well - " Seamus hastily tried to find a tactful way of putting it. "It //is// a very nice... skin tone you're having there."

"Seamus?" the voice was getting distinctly cold. "I don't think that's funny."

"No, it - " he reached towards Dean. "I mean it."

"I thought you'd had a black boyfriend before."

"No." said Seamus, frankly. "Never."

After a terrible moment Dean looked up at him. "So //that's// why you like me so much."

The warm voice Seamus adored had turned to solid ice now. His deep brown eyes rested angrily on the finger Seamus hesitantly trailed along his shoulder, along the sleek skin. For all the street lamp it was still dark in the bedroom and Dean's skin seemed to blend in and out of the shadows, like he was shaped from night. Seamus' finger was like a little pale worm on black velvet - impossible to miss the sharp contrast between their colour, Seamus' creamy skin and Dean's darkness. He tried to gather his thoughts, and said, "It's true. I do like it that you're black." How to explain to Dean the way he looked in the mornings, defined against the crisp white sheets; or the soft silver of street lamp around his skin like mist in the night; or how it was when he rested his head against the pale blue-painted windowsill and let Seamus run his hands through cropped dark hair and trace dark sinew. "Look," he said. "I'm sorry it came out that way, but I do love the way you look. It's - it's like you're black, that's you, it's your genes, but then you're beautiful too. You know."

Another memory - a summer weekend afternoon a few months ago, when Dean had sprawled over the soft grey living room sofa with his sketch block, making lead-pencil drawings for one of his comic book projects. Seamus had been watching him at work, mumbling love-words into his shoulder and Dean's pencil ran away with itself - the illustrations became rather ragged and more mature in content and Seamus eventually reached over his shoulder to forcibly remove the offensive pencil, laughing, and grabbed his hand to kiss. All that had happened was that he had noticed suddenly how beautiful Dean's fingers were, stained a little silver-black with the soft lead, and how his fingernails had escaped the lead and were clean pink windows in his perfect dark fingers. The colour of his skin set them off like pink glass in slender bars of chocolate. He had been so enamoured that he bit into them, and Dean bit back and Seamus had lost it completely.

"You're lovely." he said, now, "And your colour's part of you, and so I love it because of you. Dean, it //is// beautiful, and it's part of why you're beautiful but - but I don't love it more than yourself. You see that, don't you?"

A pause. He wasn't sure if he'd expressed it properly. It had sounded rather garbled. Dean didn't look any more angry than he already was, but then he didn't look any less angry either. Seamus said, hesitantly, "You like... my colour, don't you, Dean?"

The perfect fingers made their way up his cheek - Dean was looking at him with what seemed like curiosity. He was looking at Seamus' fair skin - for the first time, Seamus realized with an unpleasant shock. Dean, brought up in teeming, multi-ethnic, mixed-up South London, had never cared about Seamus' colour because it had never been important to him. He'd simply chosen not to notice. And now the great, lump-headed Finnigan had drawn his attention to the unwelcome, hitherto unnecessary issue of race. Seamus wished Dean wouldn't look at him like that, dark brown eyes travelling across his face, his shoulders, taking in his light sandy hair and the cool, creamy skin that went so well with autumn colours. They had gone shopping once for a new Muggle sweater for him, in the autumn. There had been russet brown, and dark green, and soft beige, and when Seamus picked out a deep, rusty red sweater, Dean had extravagantly bought him five more sweaters in each of the other colours. He'd been so taken with the exotic way Seamus looked in the Muggle winter-clothes that he'd run out of Muggle money and they'd had to nip into the dressing room, stifling their laughter, to whip up some more. In summer sunlight Seamus' skin seemed lit with pale gold just as Dean's was in silver moonlight.

Now Dean leaned over, close in the warm confines of the bed, and Seamus moved back to give him space, he was a stranger now, separated by race and the Finnigan Idiocy. He shut his eyes to stop himself flinging both arms around the wide dark shoulders and telling Dean anything he wanted if this would only stop and he could take back his words. He very nearly missed Dean's whispered, "Yeah."

"What?" Seamus' eyes snapped open and met Dean's - deep green into dark brown. "Yeah, what?" he asked, confused.

"I like your colour. It looks good on you."

And Dean's mouth unbent into a little, warm smile as Seamus groaned with unutterable relief and rolled over into his arms. "I'm such an idiot." he said in a muffled voice, after several fervent minutes. "Can I //ever// make it up to you?"

"Yeah, you can shut it and go to sleep." Dean told him, rather unkindly.

Seamus stroked his hair lazily. "I do like it, you know." he said, his voice drowsy with happiness. "When we look like a zebra crossing. Some nights."

"Do you think I care how we look some nights?" Dean asked, and Seamus laughed faintly.

It wasn't exactly a zebra crossing, he thought to himself, although it seemed that way sometimes, especially when the streetlamp cast silver and black stripes through the window blinds, blurring the lines between them. It was a more unified symbol they made out of themselves, without knowing it. More integrated. He thought, as Seamus curled closer round him in his sleep, that what they made were the two halves, light and dark, like the yin-yang sign. Something complete.

Dean smiled again, secure in Seamus' steady, gentle snores and in the fact that their colours matched, and they were, at that moment, a living zebra crossing, a recumbent, though all-male, yin and yang. He reached over to the windowsill, closed the blinds completely, and went to sleep.

==== end ===

That's all. Thanks for reading it. If the race issue offends anybody, you have my apologies, but I do feel that colours, in people, are beautiful and should be seen as such, rather than ignored in a pretence of colour blindness.

If you like Seamus and Dean as a couple, and want to read more about them, then please do check out Eggbert's "No Regrets", as this is the story that inspired "Colours".

Reviews: It's very flattering and pleasant that several people have been kind enough to say that they liked my fic. I thank all of you, very much. But a review doesn't have to be positive. I feel fic reviews should work the same way as movie reviews - to let *other readers* know what you thought of a piece of work, so that they can decide if it's worth their while. I'm not sure fic authors should even be allowed to see their reviews. ;-)

So please feel free to pass judgment on this fic. The review shouldn't be meant for me/my ego.

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